Difficulty:

Hard

Time Spent:

20 to 40 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Mixed reactions"

ok lets get a few things out the way first, the multiplayer is (as has been well documented) brilliant - playing co-op with a friend with headsets shouting orders at each other really makes you feel like a real soldier (minus the bad food, living conditions and general idea that your fighting for political reasons but hey thats not a subject for here) thats fighting for his life! The real tactical thinking you have to have is a really good challenge which makes it very rewarding when you nail the bad guys.
But anyway id like to focus on the single player campaign as this is an area that has been very much maligned by other reviewers (and rightly so). To start the cutscenes are just painfully boring, seem to go nowhere and do about as much for the game as putting bricks on a golf cart would do for a house. Also the retrospective viewpoint of most of the missions is a tad wearisome but most of all it does nothing to make you care about any of the characters, so who cares about them? lets just get going already.
Firstly the controls, a big bone of contention for me coming from just finishing MW3 (i bought both games together at the same time) firstly i want shoot on R2 not R1, i also want Melee on R3 instead of duck/lie down, while i understand that there is no obligation for making the controls this way some customisation would be great and thats before even mentioning the frankly bizarre helicopter controls and i can't tell you the amount of times i snuck up behind someone and accidently lay down on the floor, which is frustrating but something i just have to deal with.
So when you start the campaign properly your thrown straight in to a fight with no real guidance and possibly the most over sensitive aiming ever, but worst of all is the way it doesn't properly explain what to do, I for instance was attacking the endless bad guys running in to the car park when i really should have been aiming up an to the side. This is a theme that seems to continue throughout the campaign along with the occasional bugs that make your team stay behind instead of moving forward with you normally resulting in your death. Another particular instance of this i experienced in a mission where i had to get out of a tank to detonate some mines or something an then get back in the tank, however it didn't mark which tank and wouldn't let me in any of them. Once i died and reset from the checkpoint it worked fine though.
Anyway enough about that, on a more positive note the graphics are nothing short of sensational for a console game and the touches of realism like the kick back of the guns and genuine tactical play needed to make progress is really good, i just wish things were explained properly to avoid all the trial and error deaths of which there are many.
In conclusion; the campaign has a pretty uninspiring story that (as people have said before) seems to have be tacked on as an afterthought and this for me really ruins what could have been a really amazing game.
If your a multiplayer fan then this is a great game for you, however if your like me and like to play single player campaigns then avoid this disappointment and stick to the cod games.
Theres probably some people that would question why i've put 'difficulty: Hard' and i want to say that this is because of the lack of direction in any of the game and the aforementioned helicopter controls that are in no way adequately explained.